Baby boomer business owners are on the rise. In fact, they’re the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. From 2007 to 2008, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that businesses launched by 55- to 64-year-olds grew 16 percent, or about 10,000 new businesses a month, said MSNBC.com.

The Kauffman Foundation predicts that trend will continue as the workforce ages and with an employment landscape that may have changed permanently. As traditional full-time employment opportunities shrink and people needing to earn income later in life, more boomers will get pushed in entrepreneurship, say experts.

Older entrepreneurs bring decades worth of career experience, knowledge and industry contracts, and often some savings to fund a startup. But time isn’t necessarily on their side – older entrepreneurs can’t wait years for a business to turn a profit, and if they fail, they don’t have time to earn that money back, says Edward Rogoff, author of “The Second Chance Revolution: Becoming Your Own Boss After 50.”

Some boomer entrepreneurs say they opened a business based on a hobby or passion they always had but didn’t have the time to pursue.

John Olson, 45, carved table-top fountains as a hobby, but after taking an early retirement, he turned his hobby into a $2 million business. He only wished he started sooner. “I thought you had to be some kind of Harvard Business School graduate,” Olson told MSNBC.com. “But I realized you just have to apply basic business principles.”

With the company on the brink of collapse, General Motors notified 2,000 of its dealers they would lose their franchises in October 2010. Many of those business owners are now getting a second chance. GM is in the process of offering 661 dealers their franchise licenses back, after Congress forced the auto maker to give dealers a chance to appeal the process, said CNNMoney.com.

More than 1,000 dealers on the chopping block met last month’s deadline to file an appeal. Settling the 661 cases immediately saves GM the time and expense of battling them out, said CNNMoney.com. Arbitration hearings for the remaining dealers will take place over the next three months.

GM is sending a letter of intent to those dealers being offered a second chance. They will have 10 to days to review the documents and return them to the company, and then 60 days to comply with the terms of the agreement. General Motors currently has 5,500 dealers.

Many business owners hoping that the Small Business Association’s emergency loan program would keep their companies afloat have been disappointed to discover that most banks are not participating in the program.

More than 1,000 loans have been granted to small businesses since the SBA’s America’s Recovery Capital program began in mid-June, but of the 8,200 FDIC-insured banks in the country, only about 400 are making ARC loans, according to CNNMoney.com.

The ARC program offers qualifying businesses SBA-insured, interest-free loans of up to $35,000 to help them pay off existing debt.

Many large national banks have been unwilling to participate because small, low-interest loans don’t generate profits and they worry about a high default rate. Even though the loans are guaranteed by the SBA, the administrative costs for collecting on defaulted loans aren’t worth it for many banks.

Only three of the SBA’s 10 most active lenders — Wells Fargo, PNC Financial and Zions Bank – have issued the loans, said CNNMoney.com.

Smaller, regional banks eager to participate in the program have found that many applicants don’t qualify for the loans.

“We’ve screened hundreds of applications from customers and non-customers alike,” Bob Polito, senior vice president of Webster Bank in Waterbury, Conn., told CNNMoney.com. “All need the help, but few qualify.”

Despite the small number of loans issued so far, the SBA says it is on track to provide 10,000 ARC loans by the time the program ends in 2010.

Some small businesses are planning for an economic upswing, and they are rethinking business models, launching new marketing campaigns, considering real estate deals, and some even hiring new staff, said the Associated Press.

These business owners say they are moving past short-term thinking about the economy. Donn Flipse, owner of Field of Flowers, floral superstores in Florida, told the AP, “Business is going to get better, so I’m going to do something to position myself to do even better than my competition.”

The real estate market around the country has been especially hard hit by the recession, putting many small companies out of business. But some survivors are looking toward an upswing in the housing market.

Kathy Braddock, co-founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty in New York City, said she’s readying for the next boom in a city where real estate is king. She told the AP the company is improving technology so it can take on more agents – preparing to go from 250 to 1,000.

Lorrie Thomas, who runs an Internet marketing training firm in California, started implementing changes to her business model early in 2008 and launched a new Web site this March.

“That’s the best part, to do it now,” Thomas told the AP. “Other companies, when the boom kicks back in, they’re going to start doing what I did a year ago.”